THE SEAROAD
for John Kinsella
Where are they going?
Where waterspouts lower their silver
taproots into the vanishing point
of a Tasman searoad, read
the oceanıs internal workings
by what happens on the surface,
in ulcerous light, in the wake
of a Japanese longliner:
Wandering albatross, reeled in
like trolled marionettes
with hooks in their beaks;
Southern Bluefin tuna
hauled from a wave
to be brain-spiked and opened
by men in yellow raingear
who work like coroners
in the hold of a warship hospital,
lowering fleshbarrels
into liquid nitrogen.
Walk the narrow aisles
of markets, where swordfish
are dumped like blue rubber
mattresses in a glitter
of crushed ice and flies.
Where are they going?
Into stories and documents
written on coastal parchment
and leaked as filaments of blood
to currentlines dark with profit;
into driftnets and gillnets;
into reef structure, levelled
by years of trawling operations.
Entering a pulse of light
in the brain-stem
of a cardinal marker, a dugong
blows an orange sand trumpet
and rolls away, trailing seagrass
like spooled magnetic tape,
and further back
a small cylinder, wired
for satellaite tracking.
Where are they going?
Watch closely.
The worldıs largest seabird
is thumbing a ride
on a high pressure system
inside The Roaring Forties.
It will glide for days
until a hundred miles
of booby-trapped squid
divides the sea and turns
the glide into a drag.
Behind a baitschool,
Bluefin tuna are working
like surface-feeding stockdogs
until the baitfish
change to razor wire
inside their speeding mouths.
A dugong tries to outswim
its own shadow, and is overtaken.
They are going beyond
the range of echo-sounders
and spotter planes
to surface somewhere
inside our heads, vaguely
luminous, like memory loss;
like the gold circles
that appear for a moment when,
absentmindedly, we press
the corners of our eyes, and remember.
......................................................
Anthony Lawrence
PO Box 75
Sandy Bay
Tasmania 7006
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